As known in the art, operating systems such Microsoft™ Windows™ and UNIX based systems have a physical limit on the amount of addressable memory that can be used by an application. If the application exceeds this limit, it will often crash, leading to a loss of data that has not been stored to persistent memory, and perhaps also to crashes or slowdowns in any other applications that rely on the crashed application. In distributed computing networks in which separate computers connected to a common network perform work in parallel, one computer may be configured to monitor its own memory usage or the memory usage of other computers and take precautionary backup measures, either automatically or after alerting a human operator, in the event that the monitored conditions of one of the computers indicates that an application crash has occurred or is about to occur. However, such a system requires almost near constant polling of the monitored computers in order to have timely detection of a problem, and even with timely detection, the affected computer application may crash before critical data can be saved.
Accordingly, a method and system for detecting and managing low memory situations that provides time for rectifying or otherwise responding to the situation is desirable.